It's a familiar scene: Your kid brings home an art project from school that they've toiled away on, places it proudly on the kitchen table and waits for you to heap the praise on them.

Of course, you do so immediately. But not before running through a list of things in your mind as to what in the world this thing could possibly be.

You squint a little at it. You dance around the subject of what exactly this clay creation might resemble. And you eventually get your kid to come around to explaining it themselves.

Well, for the unlucky (or lucky?) parents of one very creative fourth-grader, they didn't have to ask what their kid's clay replica was trying to be — he was, after all, doing a project on the Washington Monument. But it was clear right away that things had gone epically awry at some point during the process.

Let's start with what they got right: It certainly does stand quite proudly. And tall. And it is surrounded by flags. But unfortunately, it's also the spitting image of something very, very different.